SOPA/PIPA are basically Congress' response to the problem of online piracy and copyright issues. 

 

SOPA isn't a political issue. SOPA has people from both parties who are supporting it. This has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with a combination of ignorance and money.

 

In a nutshell, the bills say that if you think a website has hosted your protected content, you can petition to have the whole site taken down. So if one person thinks one little bit of content shared on Facebook should be protected, then boom, Facebook gets shut down.

 

It's basically the end of the Internet as you know it. This is about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, news sites and blogs disappearing. It's about never having access to any sites based in foreign countries (that's a large part of this legislation).

 

One of the main thrusts of this bill is to block U.S. access to sites that originate in countries where piracy takes place. That means the borderless nature of the Internet will disappear. You will no more be able to travel wirelessly to sites around the globe as you would hop on a plane and travel to their home countries in person. Some people think just blocking IP addresses of offending sites will take care of the problem. But the way the bill is written, it could mean changing DNS info, which in non tech-speak, would break the internet.

 

Also, if there were any one instance of piracy from, say, Canada, the way the bill is written, the government could be able to block our access to all Canadian websites. It's not a "Malaysia is full of spammers, so they're blocked, but England's usually OK, so we'll let them slide" kind of thing.

 

The best way to handle the very real problem of piracy is to beef up copyright laws. They have not kept pace with current technology.

 

Online piracy is certainly a problem, but our representatives are not the right people to solve it. They were given a lot of money by big media companies and this knee-jerk reaction is the result. These old dudes in Congress have no idea how the internet works.